18 July 2012

Vendor venting

Let’s compare your typical shopping experience at an online electronics store. You can drill down to find products by a particular maker, that have certain features, or are within your price range.

This ability to drill down is even more important in scientific equipment, as there are often more options, and it's more critical to meet certain criteria. But go looking for dissecting scissors, and you can't even sort out which ones have straight blades or curved. You have to go through them one at a time.

However, since the website is built on a more standard commerical model, you can sort by the number of ratings or average ratings. Because academics just love to rate glassware. "It was so transparent! Five stars!"